


Perspective

by Eithe



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst and Feels, F/M, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, The Author Regrets Everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 07:56:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2805254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eithe/pseuds/Eithe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It takes Solas a long time to really see her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perspective

**Author's Note:**

> Please note this was written well before Trespasser came out - I'm reluctant to edit it, but a lot of the speculation doesn't fit nearly so well with lore that's been revealed since.

She’s not even an individual, at first, just the incidental mortal attached to the Anchor. What more could she be? She’s unconscious, a breathing body without a spark, and he doesn’t anticipate that she’ll wake at all, much less with her mind intact. A mortal cannot come through the Fade unscathed. Even if she does surpass his expectations and wake, the Breach expands and the mark does likewise. It is killing her. He does his best to stop the spread, but it will doubtless prove futile. Her vallaslin is distracting, a constant reminder of how profoundly the elvhen have fallen. He tries not to look. He doesn’t need a reminder of old failures when his newest mistake is so much more pressing. She is is an accident, one that is likely to be short-lived, and they will need some alternate means of interacting with the rifts if she takes the Anchor down with her when she dies.

\---

She wakes. More than that, she can make use of the mark. She becomes a curiosity; one of the Dalish, but not set in their ways. She asks questions even while there is strange magic anchoring itself to her bones and pulsing in time with the cataclysmic tear in reality. She carries right on asking questions afterwards, as well - and more, she sets aside her assumptions and truly listens to his answers. She is driven by a desperate need to reach beyond what her people know, and he appreciates the brightness of her curiosity, but dismisses the possibility that it could present a danger to him. She is still just a mortal, marked as a slave. She reflects a glimmer of what the elvhen once were, but she is no threat to him.

\---

She sends them away, all of them, demands that they run and holds the line alone. If she’s the one Corypheus wants, she’s the only one he’ll get.  
The last he sees of her, she is sneering up at the Blighted Magister. She is frightened, but she is not impressed.

\---

She survives, improbably, even faced with a man who would be a god, and the people are eager to declare her a messiah. In this new world, it is almost unprecedented for one of the elvhen to rise so far and so fast, but they watch her meteoric ascent and bask in her radiance. She is a bright light throwing off brilliant sparks of possibility, and too late he begins to understand the danger. Perhaps he might maintain his distance if he could see her as no more than a curious child, but that would do her a disservice. He calls her da’len only once - and even then, only in jest. She wants so much more than just to learn. She is hungry for knowledge, but what she really wants to reshape her world. What’s more, she is succeeding. She is not a reflection of bygone glory. She is ablaze, burning with purpose. She draws people together under one banner, carefully gathers the strands of influence in her hand. They need a leader, and they have chosen her. The power settles comfortably around her like feathers settling into place, and she soars ever-higher as if she has no fear of falling. She has always been meant for this - for so much more than leading one little clan of the diminished and the lost.

\---

She traverses the Orlesian court effortlessly, avoiding pitfalls and smoothly manipulating events to serve her ends. She defies the Empire’s traditions and leaves her face uncovered, but her features form their own kind of flawless mask; no one would ever guess that the Lady Inquisitor spent the trip to the Winter Palace shaking with barely-suppressed rage at being asked to protect the second Empire to subjugate her people. She plays their Game well enough to win a bloodless victory, and he feels a sudden, keen ache that she cannot show this side of herself in a court more worthy of her; he can see himself, eons younger, raising her up as Anduril did Ghilan’nain. She flashes a deliberately provocative wolf-smile at the assembled nobility when Briala is named Marquess of the Dales, and he almost laughs. She is not marked for him, but she turns the world on its ear so easily and so eagerly that it is impossible to see her as belonging to any cause but rebellion. They have given her a fulcrum that can move the world, and she has every intention of using it.

\---

She looks at him for a long moment, when he asks her to dance, and he feels a moment’s trepidation, an unfamiliar flicker of fear that she might refuse. He is accustomed to certainty, or at least conviction. She changes everything. She matters. Before that thought has time to settle, she has placed her hand in his with a smile, the first open and uncomplicated expression of the night lightening her face as dawn lightens the sky. It feels like a gift.

\---

She sentences Florianne to the fields, narrowed eyes weighing the Grand Duchess and finding her wanting. Florianne, she says, didn’t even understand the lives she was putting in danger with what she did - but she will. The realization that she would judge his younger self just as harshly is an uncomfortable one. For all his nostalgic wistfulness the night of the ball, he knows that she would never have consented to be raised up alone. The very fire that draws him to her, the light and the heat and the brilliance, would have drawn the ire of every one of the other gods. She would have tried to start a revolt, and they would have snuffed out her light. It is the first time he has been glad that his mistakes form a barrier between her and the past.

\---

She takes a half-step towards the Well of Sorrows. Cole warns her that the voices would talk over her, that she would cease to have autonomy even in her own mind, but still she does not give the shemlen woman leave to drink in her stead. She does not want to do it herself, but even so she argues that she should. The Temple is a reminder of all her people have lost, and her shoulders shrank in with shame when she had to ask others to translate the writing. Whatever it would do to her is worth it, she says, if it would mean that she could give her people back their language. She steps forward again. It cannot be allowed. It is too much to be borne. That she should be bound in such a way, ignorant of what it would mean, is obscene. The ‘no’ is wrenched out of him.  
There is something heartbreakingly young about her face when she asks why.  
He looks at Cole and lowers his shields for just a moment, and -  
“Should be free, flying, unfettered; she should never be shackled and to see her choose servitude, choose slavery -”  
It’s that word that breaks her. She flinches away from the pool, away from the choice, and it is enough. She lets the witch drink in her stead, though there is a shadow in her eyes even after they return to Skyhold.

\---

She has become precious and beloved; that this awful, broken future is the only world that could have produced her is difficult to accept, and yet it’s true. Her existence almost makes the horrors of his compounded mistakes not matter. The shadow of regret lingers, but she is still full of such hope for the future that it radiates, warming him down to his bones. It gives him the strength to keep trying. Someday, things will be better.

\---

The Dalish did one thing right; they made her. They also did one thing impossibly, terribly wrong. They marked her bright face to brand her as property. He tries not to look. He closes his eyes, brings their faces too close for sight, presses their foreheads together.  
“‘Ma vhenan,” he breathes across her lips, and feels her answering smile.  
He cannot help the revulsion those marks raise in him. She is fierce and proud and curious and wise, and the only one she could ever belong to is herself.  
He has to give her this truth - and the key to the shackles she does not yet know she is wearing. Her freedom must be her choice, but he can at least ensure that she has the choice to make.  
She hesitates, but she has never been afraid to leap. She already knows she can fly.  
“Ar lasa mala revas.”  
He corrects himself, when he repeats it. He does not set her free. He cannot set her free. She already is, and the symbolism of this gesture has far more weight to him than it can to her.  
He has always known she was beautiful. This is the first time he can truly see it. That is his own blindness, but it is an immense relief to see her face unmarred by old cruelties. She is beautiful. She is free.  
In another world, that would mean she would be free to choose him, but he is chained by his past and his mistakes. She is free, and he is not.  
And that means she cannot be his.

**Author's Note:**

> I have like 60 pages of notes, contradictory headcanons, and incoherent flailing and I felt like at least SOME of that needed to get polished up a little and turned into… whatever this is. I basically just excavated about half a page of rambling about how Solas's head is a terrible place to be and ran with it. Also I kept seeing things on Tumblr about Lavellan being starry-eyed and overawed and then agonizingly heartbroken after the breakup, and I tend to see that dynamic kind of working... the other way. Like, Lavellan grew up with a support network and she continues to have one throughout the game and afterwards. She's got important stuff to do, and purpose, and distractions. Solas is painfully isolated and lonely and probably dealing with depression and survivor's guilt, among other things. He's got stuff to do, but it seems to me a lot of that is tied up with a certain degree of self-loathing. Basically, if one of them is going to be coming at their relationship from a bad emotional place, I'm pretty sure it'd be him.
> 
> Oh look, I accidentally appended meta. Whatever, I'm going to go ahead and post.


End file.
